Golden Spurtle 2010: We Need Your Help!

Yep- it’s that time of year again. We can hardly believe that it’s almost been a year since we claimed the title of World Porridge Champions in the 2009 Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championship. A few weeks ago, we broke out the boxes of supplies from last year and started sorting through ideas for our 2010 specialty dish. Last year we won with our traditional porridge, which consisted of water, salt and oats. We also competed in the specialty category with our Oregon Orchard Oats Brûlée– a concoction of oats, cherries, pears and hazelnuts topped with a candy crust.

This dish embraces Italian flavors while staying true to the oats.

After some serious taste-testing (ah, life is rough) and a bit of research, we’ve settled on a savory oatmeal dish for our 2010 specialty entry. We’ve based this year’s dish on Arancini, a finger-food that originated in Sicily. Arancini is typically a risotto ball that is coated in bread crumbs and deep fried. The ball usually contains a red meat sauce (Ragù) and mozzarella. In place of a rice-based risotto, we are using an oat-risotto that contains pancetta, Parmesan and porcini mushrooms. If that doesn’t sound delicious, we’ve wrapped the risotto around a creamy Pecorino, rolled the arancine in fresh bread crumbs and deep fried them. Talk about decadent! These little balls of gooey oat goodness pair perfectly with a simple red sauce. Watch for the recipe in a few weeks so that you can try them at home.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! What should we call this fancy dish? Fried oat balls doesn’t sound very appealing. Oat-incini is a bit confusing and doesn’t really tell the judges anything about this dish. Please help us name our entry for the competition. Leave your idea here in the comments or you can contact us through Twitter and Facebook. We’ll accept names until midnight (11:59 pm PT) Thursday, August 12th, 2010. We’ll pick a name from all the suggestions and the winning name will receive a beautiful spurtle pen from the makers of our myrtle spurtles, as well as a myrtle spurtle, a case of our famous steel cut oats and a $25 Bob’s Red Mill gift card.